This research is provoked by the following blogpost of Joshua Long where he lists domain names used by Koobface. Generally, I focus on website hacks and don’t research malware distributed via email spam and social networks (Koobface is an anagram of Facebook). However that list showed me how legitimate hacked sites were integrated into Koobface scheme and I decided to try to investigate how the whole thing worked.

Joshua’s list was a good starting point. I saw multiple rogue blogspot blogs that followed the same pattern and multiple compromised sites where those blogs redirected to. For some reason, most of the functionality of the malicious pages on the hacked sites is implemented as a client-side JavaScript, so I could easily retrieve and analyze those scripts. They provided me with very interesting details about the internals of the attack: sites it expected as referrers and usage of infected PCs. As a result I came up to the following scheme:Koobface attack flow and other details »»